Thursday, February 26, 2009

A quick job for IF this week; kept to my proposed time limit of no more than 3 hours for this one! Like the idea. Am away on vacation this week visiting family. When I get back- next week- I must finally, FINALLY (!) put together a package of images to submit to various publishers and magazines. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but find myself torn between wanting to do more, better work and wanting to get to it and just submit, submit, submit... Seeing as how the 'business' side of things is harder for me, doing more work wins out... but no more! I brought along a piece that I will complete over the next few days and I want to finish a couple of pages of my book and... and... that will be it. I have to get going. I suppose that waiting until I had enough stuff that I really wanted to show isn't a bad thing (and realistically, it is true that a lot of the work that I had was NOT really suitable or appealing to the children's market), but enough already. OK, enough of the tiresome lecture to myself. Back next week with a new IF and another promotional piece!

Thursday, February 19, 2009

I missed illustration friday last week; I had the assignment (see previous post) to finish and then various other factors including houseguests conspired against even semi-prolonged periods of work on anything. The assignment went well; all in all it was a good experience. Good for many reasons; first, the subject matter was not something I would have chosen myself, so that in itself was good practice for the 'real world'. It was also good to have to respond to feedback on the sketches and requests for adjustments. It turned out fairly well, although again, not something I would have come up with myself. I will post it on my website after it has surely appeared in print (rights issue).

Friday, February 6, 2009

The big news this week is that I got a new assignment! And it's something of a rush job. The truth is that I love deadlines... It's not that I'm not able to work without them; it's more that the fact that the thing has to get done, period, provides me with the ability to make decisions quickly and not agonize so. I find that I am always confident that I will find the solution, I will do it, and do it well... because I have to. The end. There is a sense of fluidity and smoothness. So, I've already come up with and suggested a few concepts, now I'm preparing some rough sketches that I will scan and send tomorrow. The whole thing has to be done by Wednesday. I also joined SCBWI this week. It seems quite worthwhile. There are numerous forums (including critiques and manuscript/illustration exchange) and regional conferences (including a big one in Bologna). It can only be helpful to me to connect to other artists in the field.

This weekend I will be busy working on the assignment, the new theme for IF, and I must update various of the sites and forums I've joined. I've been meaning for some time to put together submission packages for various childrens' magazines/publishers but also to remind various mags that I'd queried earlier of my existence. I am torn (as always) between wanting to do it now (the sooner the better, you've waited too long already!) and waiting until I have just a few more work samples to replace those that I previously liked but that seem to have fallen out of favour... whine, whine, complain. that's all for now. In any case nothing will be done before next week.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Hay, I have three illustrations featured in the brand-new, just-out-this-week edition of the darkly quirky and beautiful B.C.-based children's literature magazine Crow Toes Quarterly. I have not yet received my copies (I am excited to see it!) but it should be available in stores near you! Ask for it if you don't see it. Clamour very loudly! Or better yet, click here to visit their site for a subscription!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

This is my second posting on Illustration Friday. So far I've received about 40 hits total from the posting last week; most were on the Friday itself... So this week I've posted it earlier, so that it will appear on the home/opening page of Illustration Friday for a few more days. I decided this week to spend three hours in total on the illustration friday drawing and just use it as a tool or opportunity for practice, a pretend assignment (good, as I'm not getting any real ones). I think that I will adopt this approach in a more general way, giving myself 'assignments' that will hopefully add to my portfolio if they turn out well, and not take too much time if they don't.